Race for the White House with Michael Duffy, Opinions Editor at Large at The Washington Post
Willy Walker: Good afternoon, everybody. It is a real pleasure to have my old friend Michael Duffy — not that Michael's old, but we have known each other for a very long period of time — join me on the Walker Webcast today. Let me do a quick intro of Michael, and then we're going to dive into a number of different things.
Michael Duffy is the Opinions Editor at Large of The Washington Post. Before joining the post, he spent over three decades at Time magazine. He joined time in 1985, where he covered the Pentagon, Congress, the White House, and served as Washington Bureau Chief and Editorial Director of Time, Inc. He has co-authored two New York Times bestselling presidential histories, including “The President's Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity."
Michael appeared regularly on PBS’s Washington Week in Review, as well as other public affairs programs. Along the way, he won two Gerald R. Ford Awards for distinguished reporting and Joan Shorenstein Award for Investigative Reporting.
Michael is a graduate of Oberlin College. He was the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and has served on the board of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Saint Albans School in Washington, DC, where we actually sat on that board together.
All right, Michael, we're going to get into things at hand today. But I want to back up a little bit here. When you were at Time, you wrote 50 cover stories, I believe. Which one of those in your mind was the most consequential?
Michael Duffy: Consequential is really hard to measure, Willy. And thank you for having me. When I was writing cover stories for Time, it was in an era where Time cover stories really had an impact and it was read by 4 or 5 million, maybe more people a year. It was kind of a different era. And the cover story really could make waves and change the weather.
I remember things that probably most journalists would remember. I remember the mistakes and I remember the oversteps and the things that kind of stay with me aren't the ones that change things, they are more like the ones I like to have over. But really if you're lucky, you get a couple in your life that really kind of move the ball or change how people think about something.
And there were a couple that I'm proud of, I'll say one thing: Politics is hard to write about. It's hard to write about fairly. It's a moving picture. What looks right today can look really wrong in a couple of weeks. And so it's a game where you expect to make some mistakes and you hope to make just some small ones. That's how I kind of think about those years and those cover stories which you can still find today.
Willy Walker: Let me push a little bit further on that, maybe flipping the question to if maybe not, you're going to say which was the most consequential, which one did you get the most blowback from? In other words, which was the one where you wrote it and either the White House called you or the President himself called you and said, what are you talking about?
Michael Duffy: I don't know what they called, I tended to hear about them afterwards – they would throw the thing across the room or something after they'd read them. My favorite story is with my colleague Dan Goodgame. Way back during, Bush 1, elder Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, we wrote something about how his first couple of months were kind of sketchy and they weren't really going in any direction, and we were kind of new to the beat. And it was a tough piece, he read it and complained, and I think he threw it across the room or something like that. But then I ran into him in the White House, which never happens to a reporter. You never just kind of like randomly bump into the President in or outside of that building. But I did a week later, which was, there he was, he looked at me and I looked at him and I said, “I hear you're upset with us.” And he said, “Well, I'm not upset. I'm just wondering about what you're thinking.” And I said, we went back and forth about the piece and he was very kind and way too nice to me for the moment. I was thinking his son, George W, would have kind of probably grabbed me by the lapels and pushed me up against the wall and said, what the hell do you know? But his father was much more elegant and kind. After talking about this piece for 4 or 5 minutes, he said, “We'll try to do better.” I thought, you're president. You don't have to say, “We'll try to do better.” But I could see that that at least got his attention. I'm not sure we were 100% right, but at least I could see, he noticed, they read, and that is sometimes as good as you can do.
Willy Walker: Talk about that for a second, Michael, in the sense that you talked about running into the President sort of in the hallway in the West Wing, which rarely happened. I remember distinctly going to the White House for the first time, I think in Reagan's presidency and sort of the structure around the press area and being led out into the rose garden for a photo op with my mom, which you or one of your other Time magazine reporters is there with her. Thinking back whether that was 1982 or 1983 and then now in 2023, 2024 sort of the relationship between the President and the press corps and the decorum or lack thereof or the way that the media engages with the President. Talk for a moment about how that's all evolved over the last 40 years?
Michael Duffy: I'm not sure I can do it perfectly. But I can tell you that it was, 50 years ago, a much smaller group of people covering the White House. It tended to be newspapers, radio and a little television. Now it's a lot of bloggers and a lot of cable networks, and people in the newspaper and radio businesses are much less important I'd say, I'm betting. Each President, depending on who it is, has his or her own relationship with the media. It's very much personality driven. Some presidents want to get to know them and even have them over socially. George Herbert Walker Bush was classic in this respect. Others keep him at arm's length. The staff is an interfering factor. They are positioned between where the press is allowed to sit and where most of the work in the West Wing gets done. But generally you’re kind of a caged animal. You sit in your very small, not particularly nice cubicles and you wait to be called. You wait until they are ready to say something or want to say something, and then everyone dashes madly. The best reporters are constantly on the phone, calling inside the West Wing and elsewhere, the executive branch and government trying to find out what's going on. It's a tough line of work. It's not easy. It's hard to find things out. It's hard to confirm things to be sure you're right. I can't stress that enough. You can hear all kinds of things, but being absolutely certain that they're true is a really different picture. And most of the people who do this well work really, really hard 100 hours a week, every day. So, there are people who go there and get the assignment and just kind of write it. But the best reporters are on the phone all day, every day. Sunup to sundown, and they're competing with the best. So it's a tough place to work, and very little is handed out that's useful or valuable without a fight.
Willy Walker: Your book with Nancy Gibbs, “The President's Club” talks about the most exclusive fraternity, I guess, in the world, as it relates to former presidents of the United States. I want to dive into a number of the anecdotes that you have in that to get a sense of these incredible leaders that you and Nancy spent a bunch of time with. Who seems to be of the Presidents you interviewed Michael, the most appreciative of the life that he had lived?
Michael Duffy: The life that they had lived as just that.
Willy Walker: At that moment, during the presidency or out of the presidency, sitting there and the most appreciative of the opportunity, having had the ability to make an impact and all that.
Michael Duffy: Well, I think the person who studied his life the closest, who thought about it the most, was one of the least successful presidents – Jimmy Carter. After leaving the White House, to his surprise, he was thrown out after one term. He spent the next 30, 40, 50 still alive years, contemplating what it meant to be an ex-President and how to contribute further. He really changed what it meant to be a former president, I think because he spent so much time thinking about how lucky he had been, grew up relatively poor in Georgia, went to the Naval Academy, got a ride on Admiral Hyman Rickover’s early atomic submarines. And then he went back to Georgia and became a farmer and eventually got into politics in a time when Georgia and the South was going through this huge civil rights upheaval.
I think Carter spent the most time thinking about his history, his life, what he'd been given, what he made of it. He wrote many of his books about him, from different perspectives, religious perspectives, literary perspectives, historical perspectives. I think he was probably the most self-conscious of the Presidents I got to know, or covered, or interviewed. And that sometimes was more than anybody wanted it. He was quite self-conscious, maybe too much so, and it hurt him politically. So I think he's a real candidate for that. A lot of them, as the elder Bush liked to say: 90% of life is just showing up. You really don't think about it too much, just follow the lead. And that for a lot of them, of George W Bush, I think, Clinton obviously had a much more checkered and complicated life. Barely knew, never really knew who his dad was.
Willy Walker: As you note in the book that George H.W. Bush was sort of the father that he never had, and that Clinton never sort of pushed back on that concept.
Michael Duffy: Right. That was the family joke, you know, ‘the brother of a different mother.’ That's how the Bushes thought about Clinton. Richard Nixon had a very hardscrabble upbringing. I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it, but it definitely affected how he operated as a politician, as an adult. And eventually it partly got him in trouble. And Gerald Ford's own family life was extremely complicated as a child. So, they all come from different backgrounds. And I think some of them want to think about it. And some of them don't.
Willy Walker: You write that no club in America would have all of them, in the sense of how diverse a group of people and backgrounds and personality types it is, and that that in and of itself is somewhat reflective of our country and how incredible it is the types of leaders we have.
Michael Duffy: Yes. I would say a decade or so, the French elected a prime minister who for the first time in a generation, had not gone to all the right schools and not come from the right families and not had the right jobs. And it was something of a crisis in Paris. And I can't remember the exact name of the French prime minister, unfortunately. It got me thinking, oh, my God, we're so different. If you looked at the lineup of Nixon to Ford to Carter, to Reagan to Bush and Bush and Clinton and Obama and Trump, and I've left one out in there somewhere, there is no unifying feature to any of it. It's just a reflection of just how wild, motley, and diverse this country is. And it's becoming more so, and I suspect so will our Presidents. So they're bound together not by who they are or where they came from, but by the fact that they sat in this chair, dealt with some of the impossible choices, I have to say, got bruised and scarred in ways none of us will understand, but they all understand. And that's what has in the past, not recently, but in the past, bound them together in that common purpose to preserve the powers of the office.
Willy Walker: There are a couple in the book you dive in on a couple of relationships, Carter-Ford and then into Bush 1-Clinton. Talk for a moment about Carter-Ford and how two people who, well, Carter beat Ford. And so Ford had to deal with that as it relates to you beat me. How did the two of them come together to forge their relationship? And then we'll go to Bush 1 and Clinton, which is the odd couple, seemingly of them all that really was one of the more deep relationships that you write about.
Michael Duffy: One of the curiosities about these guys who've had this job is that they tend to get along better when they're from opposite parties. The guys so far, only guys, who do not get along are the ones who came up both as Republicans or both as Democrats. There's just too much competition, and this goes on until they die. I mean, it never really ends. There's always edginess between, say, a Clinton and a Carter.
Willy Walker: Now Obama-Biden.
Michael Duffy: Obama-Biden has always been edgy, and Nixon-Reagan was edgy. And so inside the party they tend not to bond. They don't tend to be bros. But between parties, there's all this extraordinary chemistry where they kind of understand each other and they finally meet someone who they can kind of talk to. This was true of Nixon and Clinton as well. Those two guys. I mean, it's just amazing how they got along. But in Ford and Carter's case, they ran against each other. Carter beat Ford and they didn't talk for, I don't know, 5 or 6 years at all until Reagan sent them both to Sadat's funeral in ‘81 and spent like 19 hours together on Air Force One. They realized they had many of the same problems putting together their libraries, raising money for them, dealing with their spouses. They actually had a fair amount in common. And then they went on to do like 30 projects together! A lot of them in this country, a lot of them overseas. And it got to the point where Ford asked Carter to deliver his eulogy, which would have been unthinkable in 1976. Unthinkable. And Carter did that very proudly and took it very personally and it was just a sign that we are able to get along when we try.
The same with Clinton and Bush and of course, Clinton beat Bush in ‘92, again, another one term president. And yet, those two, with the little help from Bush 2, were sort of partnered/ harnessed on all kinds of charitable work through the 1990s and 2000s, until Bush died in 2019. And so, again, unlikely buddies. And they would visit each other and they would call each other and they would look out for each other. Bush was constantly telling Clinton to go see doctors before Clinton needed to see doctors. And so there was a kind of rare, I don’t want to say best friends, because that's overstating the case. But they were certainly partners in all kinds of efforts, both personal and broader. And I think that shocked everyone. So, again, across parties, easier than inside the parties, which again, is a model for us, Willy.
Willy Walker: It reminds me a little bit of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as you very well know, were great pen pals and ended up dying on the exact same day, July 4th. Just how their relationship obviously in a very different era as it relates to communication of having to send each other actual letters rather than an email or text.
Michael Duffy: And I think it has to do with the fact that there's only what is it? We're 45, 46 have I mean, I don't know if, less than 50 people have had this job. There's an unusually large number of them still alive, as history goes. But as someone who worked with four of them closely told me, you know, you go through crap in that job that makes it almost impossible for anyone to understand what's required. As he put it: “You can't even talk to your spouse about most of this stuff.” And the only people who really understand what it's like to sit in the chair are the people who've sat in the chair before you, and because they've been through it all, they've seen all the absurd, impossible tradeoffs, the choices that even if you make the right one, you're going to get half of it wrong. As CEOs know, by the time most decisions get to the top, the easy choices have long ago been made. And that's what these guys have to choose from. And there are usually often no winners. And they get blamed. And that stuff sticks. I mean, it's a little different to make a decision as President than it is as we're all leaders of something, even if it's just our own selves. But those decisions have a vast impact, and they have to live with them for the rest of their lives.
Willy Walker: That sense of the exclusivity of the club and the experiences does remind me of one of my mother's favorite pictures on Clinton's last morning in the Oval Office, before he went up for the inauguration of George W Bush. And on the desk in the Oval Office is a letter that he wrote to George W Bush, but in that letter, he put a copy of the letter that George W Bush, his dad, had written to Clinton. I thought about that kind of how neat and exclusive that is, that a father wrote the letter to Clinton, and then Clinton wrote a letter to the son and the three of them in that – one of the things you raised, Michael, as it relates to George W Bush and Bill Clinton, is that they sort of polar opposites of the baby boom generation. How is their relationship, even though it was W, as you mentioned previously, who sort of put H.W. and Clinton together when they went over and did the tsunami relief effort, which is what really started the relationship. But how have W and President George W Bush and Bill Clinton gotten along subsequent to this great relationship between H.W. Bush and Clinton?
Michael Duffy: You’re right, W gets credit for putting his father and Clinton together. You know, I think Nancy and I interviewed Clinton and Bush together in Houston about, I would say in 2016. I'm almost certain your mother was there to take those pictures. And she did a fabulous job of course, I got to say, working with Diana, I wish I could do it over and over. The fascinating thing about that interview was that at that time, Hillary was running again for the nomination against Trump. Oh, no, it was earlier than that. Hillary was in the running and so was Jeb. And we were really asking Clinton questions about what it was like to have his wife now run. W could see what we were doing, we're kind of drilling in on Clinton saying, what does this like and doesn't make you feel comfortable? And what about this and my favorite part of the session was that Bush would then step in front of the questions that we had asked Clinton to sort of answer them, saying, “I got this. I'll take this one off your hands.” I'll protect you here. He was literally interposing himself in front of Clinton because Clinton, there was no way to answer some of the questions without upsetting someone. Which reminded me of what Clinton had done for his father five years earlier, when they were working on stuff. So it was quite sweet across parties to have W who hasn't been real public, who stayed out of the limelight, who's really made an attempt to just step away from any kind of public position or even profile, to in that session, step in and say, I know what you're doing, here's the answer. Drove me crazy. It was great.
Willy Walker: So, when you and Nancy back in 2012, were talking about the book, there was a speech that you both gave where both of you talked about the character and that we elect as president, and talking about how important our most important decision as citizens is to go vote. And at that time, the two of you were focused on Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, two wildly accomplished, relatively young, established leaders. And I sit there and think about where we are today, and it reminds me of the Talking Heads song: how did we get here?
Michael Duffy: It's the question everyone in America is asking.
Willy Walker: It is. It very much is. How did we get here?
In 2015, Michael, you interviewed Karl Rove, and you asked Rove, do you think that Trump gets the nomination? And Rove at that time incorrectly said, no, I don't think he can do it. But he did in that interview with you put forth the broad landscape of why Trump could win.
Michael Duffy: Yeah.
Willy Walker: Talk about that for a moment because Rove was wrong with the specifics, but right on the generalities.
Michael Duffy: Right. I mean, I think Rove sensed earlier than most that America was about to enter a fairly... I think he even said we're heading into a populist era where the extremes of both parties are going to be more powerful than they have for the last 50 or 60 years. He cited first, I remember, how the left was gaining strength inside the Democratic Party and with more subtlety he talked about how, in the Republican Party elements which had not been at the forefront, were becoming more predominant, particularly with respect to immigration and crime, and I also think economics, he sensed early that the previous couple of Presidents, I guess he'd probably include Bush in this, although, I don't know, had let the working class fester without the economic supports that it had been promised by the government in the wake of NAFTA, globalization and the rise of China. Karl talked about all of that and how it could be deeply disruptive or something like that. He was careful. Impact on our politics and Rove being a Republican, particularly with W, particularly coming from Texas, understood, I think better than most, how big that potential force on Republican politics could be and how it could spread to the Democratic Party, which it more than has. So, he was reluctant. There was a lot of was and is a lot of opposition inside that kind of Bush world to Trump. It's not discussed much, but it's there. And I think he was worried about it, but he could see the bigger forces that were, I think, poised I would say emerge, but you could say explode.
Willy Walker: Yeah. It's interesting that you talk about Rove's view of things because, I mean, how quickly our politics have evolved. One of the things that is quite, I think, shocking is that in 2000, Rove and George W Bush decided to focus on West Virginia. And up until 2000, no first term Republican had won the state of West Virginia. Incumbents had won it, but nobody - a Republican first time Republican. It was a solid blue state. And Rove and Bush won it in 2000, which was a key factor in making it so that Florida was the true swing state, if you will. And you think about today, West Virginia being not solidly red, you know, blood red, and how that promise to middle class America has been squandered and lost by the Democratic Party and picked up by this more populist Republican Party.
Michael Duffy: I don't think Obama really has gotten the discredit he deserves for not paying more attention to Democratic politics. As a president, you can usually rely on an incumbent president or a sitting president to nurture and take care of grassroots state and local politics inside his party. Obama didn’t, there is not a lot of sign that he cared about it. And I don't think he's really gotten the criticism that he probably deserves for it. But the roots of that discontent and that populism goes back to NAFTA, which was started by Bush 1 and put in place by Clinton. And there's a 30 year trend.
Even now, I think the Clinton people are wrestling as Clinton approaches the end of his life, how they're going to explain the impact NAFTA and granting most favored nation status to China will have on his legacy, because they really were devastating to core Democratic constituents. And the Republicans moved in on them and now have a huge advantage with white working class, non-college voters.
Willy Walker: Your comment on China reminds me a little bit of the speech that the President of Argentina gave at the World Economic Forum, and you interviewed Klaus Schwab a couple of years ago, talking about what the major issues were. And he correctly identified machine learning and artificial intelligence as a big issue. Climate is a big issue. And then the rising China and I found the speech by the President of Argentina who is completely reorienting Argentina, saying, you know we shouldn't be friends with China. We shouldn't be friends with communist and socialist states. We should be friends with Israel, the UK and the United States of America, democracies that represent capitalist society and ideas and growth and freedom. And it's such a significant shift. To anyone who's listening today who hasn't listened and watched his speech. I would strongly recommend it. Whether he can survive in Argentina, I think, is a big question. But boy oh boy hearing him to some degree articulate, a world view that has been very different from what's been sort of espoused for the last 20 years. I mean, I was very surprised by that speech at the World Economic Forum. And sort of if you think about that meeting, Michael, and your interview with Klaus Schwab as it relates to the real issues that are coming up, I thought that might be a marking point of some type of long term change as it relates to developing nations looking to democracies once again, rather than to dictatorships and socialist countries. Am I being too hopeful?
Michael Duffy: I think it's a little humble, but I agree that it's totally refreshing and I wish American politicians were saying the same things out loud. Neither Biden nor Trump seems able to put those kinds of words together and provide that kind of positive leadership for people. I am struck by how you can't distinguish, for example, between Trump and Biden on trade anymore. They both seem to be for slapping all kinds of restrictions on trade with China. This is again 20 years after both parties were totally for free trade with China, now both parties are totally against free trade with China. You can hear or see the parties scrambling to catch up with where voters have been for, as you noted, 15 or 20 years. They don't quite know how to do it. There are positive ways to show and take leadership here. But what we hear from the two candidates is here's what we shouldn’t do, not really what we should. So I am, on that score, quite disappointed. I’m not saying you’re over optimistic, but I think I’d mark you down as optimistic. But I think it’s better to be optimistic Willy. I think you got to be. It's more of a struggle than it used to be.
Willy Walker: Yeah. I mean, sticking with the World Economic Forum for a moment because you may have seen Jamie Dimon's comments at the World Economic Forum on CNBC, where he said you can give Trump a lot of flak for this and that. But if you think about where he was in China, where he was on the economy, where he was on border security, he had those big issues taken care of. And, listening to Jamie say that I sat there and said, you know, hey, guess what? Directionally, on some of these big issues that seem to be top of mind and people want solutions on them, Trump clearly seemed to be focused on them and doing things against them. Whereas the Biden administration has struggled to make a case as it relates to their economic success, their success against China, and clearly on border security.
And then, Michael, as I was getting ready for this, I went back and read your interview with Bob Woodward, after he had written his book, “Fear: Trump in the White House.” And I had forgotten sort of what's in that book. So let me go to you for a moment, because one of the things that I think is important for everyone to think about, and this is kind of removing the politics of it and going to just the practical research that Bob Woodward did. I mean, you've won awards for all of your research and investigative reporting. Bob Woodward is known as the investigative reporter all the way back to Watergate, to today, you can discount half of what he writes in the book, and you're still going to come up with firsthand accounts of what it was like to be in the Trump White House. Let me go to you and just go through a little bit because you sit in his kitchen in Washington and have him tell you face to face, some of these encounters that make my eyes spin in reading what you wrote about.
Michael Duffy: I mean, that book was astonishing because he had such unparalleled access to Trump. And he had him on tape and he released the tapes of Trump talking about it, which was really a completely different experience even if you're a Woodward fan, to hear the voice. To hear the conversation. To hear the back and forth between the best reporter of his generation, maybe of several generations, and a president who was very, I think, was sometimes difficult to understand.
There's no question that Trump has capitalized on the public anxiety about the economy, about immigration and about crime. And Biden as President, while he has made moves in all of those, has gotten almost no credit or, not been able to convince the public that he's made a difference on any of them, right or wrong. So it's always easier to be running against than to be sitting in power. And I think the polls reflect that. What I remember most about Woodward back and forth with Trump was about COVID and Trump's candid comments to Woodward that he really didn't want to believe at first. He wasn't sure if it was a Chinese thing, but that didn't matter. He just wanted it to go away. His resistance to taking it seriously, and then moving to actually take it seriously and pushing the vaccines along, which did occur. His belief that it was probably overblown, those were revealing conversations which were released a year or two later, after a million people had died. Trump doesn't get blamed for that, but I think Woodward was showing in a way that few reporters ever get to, how the presidential mind works iteratively, not in a straight line. It's always everybody zigs and zags their way to solutions and decisions.
I'm not sure I can even do them justice. You felt at that point like you were having a biopsy of someone or vivisection. You were inside Trump's brain for hours on end. And it's worth going back and listening to those tapes because especially now that he's running again to remind yourself how his brain works. It's quite something. We won't get that again, and that will never happen again, Willy. No president, a former president or future president is ever going to open himself up to a taped conversation like that again.
Willy Walker: So in Woodward's book, he also says to the President (you report on this as you talk about the book) that when Trump came into office, there were really three factions inside of the White House. You had sort of the old school Republicans. You had the Steve Bannon group, and then you sort of had the more progressive group, and that they were kind of warring factions about which direction the administration would go. They were all kind of having this internecine war to try and figure out who could win and push the president in the right direction. And as we now know, nobody won. The person who won was Donald Trump. But in that description, there's a lot about the president undercutting and insulting the people around him. And one of the big questions that I have now, Michael, is if Trump wins, who goes to work for him?
Michael Duffy: I mean, I don't think he's going to make the mistake he made the first time, which is to bring in the establishment Republicans who absolutely went in in order to keep the trains running on time and keep the ship in the channel. They won't come back. The progressive group and it was hard to know exactly who that represented, but his daughter and son in law were certainly in that pack and aren't likely to come back. You can look to his campaign for hints, Willy. You know, he surrounded himself with an extremely professional bunch of political pros who know the rules, mastered the rules, change the rules, are playing for keeps and are not representing anybody but Trump. So I think we've already seen him move from certainly having factions try to help him, to having one group that is devoted entirely and solely to him. And I suspect he’ll keep that. Some of the folks who would not have gotten past the establishments or the progressives inside the Trump White House will get in this time. Heaven only knows what that will mean for policy. And he said, you know, “I’m not going to make the mistakes I made before” which is by trusting the Reince Priebus and the John Kelly’s and the folks who he thought, I think, and others thought, would keep the ship from running aground. If Trump wins, we're in a completely different landscape where there are no governing governors, people who can keep it in a narrow range, acceptably, moderate range. I don't think that's likely. And I think it's quite the opposite. I think it's really, it's no holds barred. So, we'll see how he surrounds himself. We'll see when he picks a vice president what he might be thinking. But it's hard to know yet. I think those days are gone.
Willy Walker: After Nikki Haley lost to none of these candidates with 63% of the vote in Nevada yesterday and Nikki Haley getting 30% of the vote -is it over?
Michael Duffy: I think it is over. He's ahead of her 2 to 1 in her home state. She has the money from all kinds of sources to stay in it longer. And if I were her, I'd probably stay in in case something happened to Trump. There's no downside to staying in, especially if someone else is footing the bill and there'll be people to pay for it. On a national basis, or in most states, Trump is ahead 3 or 4 to 1. Some states, more than that. So, yeah, it's over unless something happens to Trump and that's the string she's pulling. And as long as she has money to pay for her, she'll get the press attention for free. And, so, you know, it doesn't take that long to win a majority of votes in the Republican primary because there are fewer delegates at stake. Super Tuesday is coming up fast. And so, another month, perhaps, probably.
Willy Walker: For a moment turning to Biden and that nominating process. I mean, we've got a couple independents out there that everyone says is going to hurt Biden and help Trump. Putting the independents to the side, Dean Phillips. Does he have any shot at gaining any momentum between now and the convention?
Michael Duffy: I think that race is over too. I would pay close attention to the Michigan primary later this month. I think it's a few days after South Carolina. It's important because in 2016, Trump beat Clinton basically by winning three states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. In 2020, Biden won those three back and by a margin of something like 75,000 votes, he won the presidency. Those three states really matter. At the moment, Wisconsin is probably leaning toward Biden. Pennsylvania is probably leaning toward Biden but Michigan is definitely plus five Trump. So, the three states if you had to close your eyes for nine months and wait until November, all you really need to keep an eye on here are Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. And among those, Michigan's the most important, not only because it used to be the most reliably Democratic, but because it's trending toward Trump now in all the statewide polls. Remember, these races are not a national campaign. It's 50 statewide races. And the way we're divided means it's really only a half dozen statewide races that really decide these things. Among those states, those three are the most important. And among those three, Michigan's by far the most important. And that's made more complicated this year by what's going on in Israel and Gaza, because Michigan has the highest percentage of Muslim-American voters in the country, and they are restive and not pleased with Biden. So he has a real problem in Michigan, you know, and the Michigan primary, which is kind of like the dress rehearsal, is later this month on the 27th. Last time Biden won the Michigan primary, he beat Bernie Sanders with less than a million votes. It'll be interesting to see how many votes Biden gets in that primary where he's facing those two guys you mentioned or he didn't mention. But so that's a real marker coming up in February in this campaign. And if I had one thing, I'd like to know the answer to today that's happening in February in politics is what will the turnout be for Biden in Michigan?
Willy Walker: Is that the reason that Whitmer continues to circulate as a potential candidate is because there is that focus on those three states as being the kind of the swing states right now?
Michael Duffy: It’s a factor, she's popular and she could probably carry that state there. All kinds of names are circulating because people are so unhappy with the choices. I mean, I can't go out my door without someone saying, “Really, is this the best you've got?” Like it's my fault.
Willy Walker: Maybe if you'd written a little bit harder, we wouldn’t have them. I'm surprised as it relates to Michigan, Biden trailing given all of the support he's given to the unions and the automobile workers.
Michael Duffy: It's just table stakes, Willy, he's got to do that just to be competitive in those states. You know, it doesn't actually gain him any great big advantage. And my guess is, well, Michigan has a huge percentage of voters who are union members or live in union households. It's not a majority. They're only 15 or maybe less percentage of Americans who are actually in unions now, Unions are very popular. Being in a union, not very popular. Key distinction. They're popular as ideas. You ask people as they support unions, they say, absolutely. It's like 4 to 1. If you ask people if they want to be in a union, it's like 1 to 4. So, Michigan probably isn't as unionized as it was last week.
So, I think you can overstate that the thing you hinted at though it is interesting, is whether it's Jared Polis in Colorado, Gavin Newsom in California or Whitmer in Michigan. Shapiro in Pennsylvania. The Democrats have a huge and extremely competent next class of people coming up behind the 81-year-old. They're governors. They're all up for most of them in the next cycle, they're all going to be raising money. Everyone's already watching them. Whatever happens in this election, the farm team is on the D side at the moment. But none of them are big enough or strong enough to actually shove Biden aside.
Willy Walker: So I think the polling is that 70% of Americans are disappointed that we have Trump and Biden at the top of the two tickets, I think.
Michael Duffy: Surprised it's not higher.
Willy Walker: Yeah, some are around there, 30% who are really, really excited. But that then leads to this sort of parlor game, parlor conversation of what could happen between now and November to shake this up? Two weeks ago, Biden said I'm going to step down and give all of my electoral votes to Michelle Obama.
Michael Duffy: Can I bet someone that that's not going to happen? I'd love to get a little of that action. That'd be great. Yeah. We're now in the far-fetched scenario part of the conversation. Okay, good. Keep going.
Willy Walker: The issue with it is, is that that's where everyone is right now. So in other words, you're basically saying forget about the far-fetched scenarios, you shouldn't spend any time on it, because at the end of the day, it's going to be Trump v Biden unless Biden has a health issue or Trump is convicted.
Michael Duffy: Basically you have a race between a man who's 81 and another man who has 81 criminal counts against him. Both parties have endless detailed rules, policies and procedures for dealing with the far-fetched scenarios. If, say, one of these guys has to step away before the convention, if one of them has to step away during the convention, if something has to be done to the tickets after the convention, they have all these rules, all these procedures, all these it's all written down and there are 4 or 5, maybe six experts on it in the country who can tell you what they are, maybe fewer. What we don't have is any experience with it.
Neither party has had to make a change since 1972, when George McGovern decided to just shove Tom Eagleton off the ticket and replace him with Sargent Shriver. And that was in a time, Willy, when the public trusted the establishment, trusted the elites, trusted the elders in the party to do the right thing and make the kind of decisions that were in the best interest of the country. There's nobody in either party who thinks that the party elders, whether it's the Republican Central Committee or the superdelegates of the Democrat, have any standing to make any decisions anymore. So even if the far-fetched scenario takes place, and even if those policies, protocols and practices have to be invoked, it's not at all clear to me that either party would accept what the powers that be inside of them, decide. It's just a really much more hostile, anti-establishment era, as you know, and I think it's anybody's guess what might happen. All of that makes me think we're not going down that route. I'm sorry to say.
Willy Walker: So it's Trump v Biden November 2024 and we'll see where it all ends up.
Michael Duffy: Yeah, if I thought that was going to change, I probably said something earlier. I really do think we're stuck here. I think that's what is making people so frustrated and have them pull out their hair if they have hair. And I also think that the mood is such that it will be really difficult to bring about an alternative ticket for either party.
By the way, changing the ticket after, say, March, isn't something either party wants to do. It's like no one goes out and wants to have a skiing accident. That's not something people get up in the morning and want to do. And these parties don't want to shift their power; they don't want to change the power structure. And the financial donor base is locked in on these two guys. If anything, both sides think they have their best candidates. The voters don't think that. But the parties think, oh, these are our best candidates. Your face tells me that you actually heard that, right? They think they've got their best guys. Let the best pitcher pitch.
Willy Walker: Yeah. Makes me think back on one thing as it relates to the best ticket and best team and making changes. There's been plenty, obviously, of criticism about Kamala Harris as vice president. And lots of people are saying, you know, if people have more confidence in the vice president, they'd sit there and maybe give Biden a little bit more of a hall pass for 81 years old, and that they'd sit there and have some confidence there. I'm just curious, did George H.W. Bush tried to get rid of Dan Quayle in the ‘92 election?
Michael Duffy: Question: every President has at some point contemplated dumping his Veep. Almost everyone you know, Nixon dumped Agnew. Bush thought about losing Quayle, and they actually had lunch to discuss it at one point. I don't think Obama really would never have ever abandoned Biden, but I don't think there was a whole lot of love between those two guys. There was a moment where W thought Cheney was just becoming ridiculous, crazy. I don't even think he was up for reelection when it happened. I just think that all these guys get sick of their running mates and think about it. But again, the price is really high, and, so, I think that's where we get into this piece of politics that people don't write about very much, just the human frailty piece of politics. We get fed up with our partners and friends from time to time. And that happens in this, too.
But I don't think that's going to happen here. I think the black vote is way too important. The price of moving Kamala aside would be way too high and probably finish him if he isn't finished. If he got to the point where he felt that was going to help him, he's probably already done. So I don't see that happening. And it would set off a battle royale. There would be more trouble than it's worth. So, that's not going to happen.
Again, I'm really trying to pour cold water on all the far-fetched scenarios, though. The one thing in the polls that makes me think Trump isn't going anywhere either, is that he's ahead in almost all these statewide polls by margins that are surprising people. And if the only thing in the polls that suggest that he would have a problem is that he is convicted of one of these criminal cases before the election, and that in 6 or 7 of the battleground states, Trump's numbers really do go south. But I don't see Donald Trump as the kind of person who's going to step away from a chance to get even.
Willy Walker: Yeah. I highlighted at the top, Michael, that you wrote over 50 Time magazine covers and you went to the point, that way back when Time was really the most influential publication, clearly on a weekly basis that there was. You're now at The Washington Post and I'm just curious, you're thinking as it relates to consolidation of particularly print media and more kind of to the point, ownership by these billionaires. So Bezos at the Post, Musk at X and Murdoch at News Corp/Wall Street Journal. Any concerns on your part as it relates to consolidation of media and ownership by billionaires?
Michael Duffy: Well, I think the alternative is non-existing.
Willy Walker: Better to have it under that kind of structure than not have it at all?
Michael Duffy: Given that choice. Time got bought by Marc Benioff, who runs Salesforce and he's kept it alive. And I'm grateful for that. Jeff Bezos has done the same with the Post. And I'm sure a similar situation exists at the L.A. Times. That hasn't prevented any of these organizations from having to keep an eye on its P&Ls and watch their bottom lines and make reductions, in order to keep the things profitable or as close to profitable as the owners will permit. The economics of this line of work is not any better than it was a decade ago. It's a tough business. It's gotten a lot tougher, and everybody is more mindful of that now than they were certainly when I left Time 8 or 9 years ago. Are they mindful enough? I'm guessing not.
So I think all these titles have a challenge, to kind of answer your question, I don't think any of them are thinking about print as the goal anymore. I think that there are increasingly vestigial operations that are maintained for certain readers who pay at certain price points. But the future and 99% of the energy in all of these places is web based and digitally based and involves all kinds of experimentation that would have been unthinkable before that.
I think a lot of these owners have given people not just permission, but demanded that they engage, and so a lot of that dynamism is good. But I don't see anyone who really has a perfect solution to this. I live in a very small town in Montana. It once had a vibrant daily newspaper and now has a newspaper that's printed 200 miles away and edited in Iowa. And it comes out three times a week. It's very hard to know what's going on in a state that, and so many of our states are in control of one party or the other, 40 of them now that it's more important than ever that we know what's happening in government and as a country, it's really important that we know what everybody's doing so we can stop making a cartoon of each other. We all have these ridiculous ideas if I can have one more minute, about who the other side is, you know, some ridiculous percentage of Democrats think all Republicans make more than a quarter million dollars a year and some ridiculous percentage of Republicans think all Democrats are black, gay and bisexual. You know, it's just crazy how we have caricatured each other in this country. We have cartoon versions of who we are and part of the reason is we have no way to find out otherwise. We live in separate worlds. We don't have newspapers to tell us what's going on. It's really not a good formula.
Willy Walker: Yeah. All right. Final question I have for you…
Michael Duffy: On that note?
Willy Walker: Yeah exactly. You have sat down with world leaders, the most influential people on earth many times throughout your career. If today, you could have an hour with anyone to ask the kinds of questions that I've asked you today, if you could have that hour to sit down and have a meal with them - who would that person be and why?
Michael Duffy: Well, you know, it'd be fun to get W and Obama in a room together. I've never done that. Particularly on this economic stuff about voters and what's become of the middle class in the last 40 years. W took over in 2000, Obama took over in 2008. Over that 16 years was followed by Trump. Looking back, we can all see that there was a time when we all kind of lost sight of the ball here and it would be great to have them talk about that, to hear them candidly speak about what they would do maybe differently, what they didn't pay enough attention to, what got away from them. Clinton's begun to do that a little bit. That's really that period. Those two guys really Obama and Bush would be great to have together. I know just who to photograph it. And I think that'd be fun, and interesting and it hasn't happened, and I'm not sure it ever will, but I think that would be kind of a little bit of a we'd be able to pick a lock there a little bit, be like a skeleton key to an era that clearly changed us. And we're only now beginning to understand how much it did.
Willy Walker: On that, what's the one question you'd like to ask but you probably wouldn't ask?
Michael Duffy: “What would the two of you have done individually, to prevent the rise of Trump and a kind of politics that poses real risks to democracy? What would we have done as a nation in those 16 years, and what could you guys have done differently that would have done more to preserve our democracy for the next hundred years?” That would be the question. I bet they thought of it.
Willy Walker: As someone who was a fan of traditional Republicans. I go back to 2012 and think about how the course of history would have changed if Mitt Romney had beaten Obama in 2012. But anyway, that's all.
Michael Duffy: That's all counterfactuals.
Willy Walker: Yeah, exactly. You got it. Michael, always great to see you stay warm up there in Montana. And thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Michael Duffy: Best to you, Willy. Thanks for having me.
